How Long Should You Leave Your Baby to Cry

In General, Don't

While it's not always possible to get to your baby the minute he starts crying; in general, don't leave him to cry at all. When a baby cries it's because he's distressed, and "distressed" means "stressed" - plain and simple. He may not be hungry, and he may not need a diaper-change, but there's something bothering him. Otherwise, he wouldn't be crying.

Obviously, if you're somewhere like the bathroom when your baby wakes up twenty minutes earlier than you'd expected, and if not being able to be absolutely immediately responsive happens only rarely, it isn't going to do a lot of long-term damage. It's making lack-of-responsiveness a habit that can result in seriously negative consequences for your baby's development.

Babies don't lay in their cribs, thinking up ways to try to manipulate their parents. They're not capable of that kind of thinking. My concern (and the concern of many experts, as well - look it up) is that a stressed/distressed baby's brain chemicals will be different than a calm baby's will be. Brain-chemicals and hormones associated with stress (even in adults) are not healthy.

With a baby's brain being in the stage of development that it is, and with the need to form the right kind/number of brain connections; it only makes sense that every minute a baby spends distressed is one more minute with an unhealthy "blend of chemicals going on". A minute or two of being upset obviously isn't gone to do a whole lot of damage, but a baby who is regularly left in distress is losing time having a more nurturing/healthier "blend of chemicals" influencing his development.

Newborns cry more than older babies, of course, but if you respond immediately to them and make efforts to calm them; they usually become calmer, surer, babies once they're past being newborns; and as they get a little older they even learn how to get your attention without much crying at all. The older they get, the surer or your responsiveness they get. More importantly, the less easily distressed they tend to be because they're secure and calm and sure babies.

What I'm saying here isn't just something I read written "in books" and by experts. None of my three babies cried much at all - not in general, not when they were teething, not when they were tired, sometimes not even when they had ear infections. Sometimes when they were sick enough they'd be fussy. That was it. They did cry in their first couple of months or so, of course. It wasn't that they "inherited an easy nature". One of them was adopted. If you're thinking (as some people implied at the time) they may have been "mentally slow", it wasn't that either. They were all kids who were well ahead in development.

They were also not "spoiled" (in case that's what someone reading may be thinking). Neither were they "inactive", the way some people tend to assume when hearing of a baby who seldom cries. My three kids are grown, but I've heard all the arguments in favor of "just leaving them to cry" for decades now. I'm not always so sure of myself, or so vocal, about something I believe; but this particular subject is something I'm sure enough about to be vocal and emphatic about.

One irony I found by being committed to always being responsive to my babies was that by being willing to get up from a chair, or out of bed, to go respond to my baby during those first several weeks when they were more prone to crying; by two months I found caring for my babies far less demanding than mothers who aren't very responsive often do. It's important to point out that being responsive isn't something to stop being once a baby is a couple of months old. The point here is that a more secure, sure, baby is more likely to develop better and is less likely to cry more than surer, more secure, babies do.

Too many people don't realize the importance of being responsive (and too many worry that their baby will be "spoiled" or will "learn to use crying to manipulate them"). Babies/children are the ones who will pay the price when they have a mother (caretaker) who doesn't do the most natural thing in the world, which is to respond to her baby when he cries. It's not rocket science. Don't listen to anyone who says you should leave your baby to cry. Your baby isn't someone else's science experiment. He's your child, and even if you can't figure out what it is that is making him cry, he isn't crying "for nothing". It's that simple.

Good reading for parents: At Ask Dr. Sears (dot come): 7 Things Parents Should Know About Baby's Cries. (Unfortunately, a live link cannot be included here, but going to the "Ask Dr Sears" site and searching for the article should get you there.

A link to other crying-related articles (from the Ask Dr Sears site) can be found at the top/right of this Hub.

Note

It is not the intent here to suggest that during the course of a baby's first year there will never be those times when your baby is uncomfortable or sick, and because of it spends long stretches of time, crying or being fussing; and that it will always be possible to make sure your baby is completely happy before he nods off to sleep in his crib. Babies can have those times when they're sick, tired, over-stimulated, or otherwise miserable and will have their bad days, just as we all do. The difference is sometimes that most of us don't cry when we're miserable. Babies do (or at least they do more often than the rest of us tend to). With their brand new central nervous system and brand new digestive (as well as all those other brand new systems they have), newborns, more than older babies, often have more of those particularly challenging bad days when they're particularly cranky or just plain miserable.

There can even be those times when a parent's efforts to comfort a crying baby are fruitless, particularly when a baby is suffering with something that causes particularly severe discomfort. Continued fruitless efforts to find something to do that will help stop the crying can sometimes actually make things worse; because by the time something like gas pains subsides, a newborn may have become particularly frazzled after being uncomfortable for so long, but also after being the focus of a parent's efforts to try one thing after another, which often involves a lot of shifting the baby's position, trying new things, and maybe even a little passing him back and forth to see if another adult may have "the magic answer" to what needs to be done. The combinations of circumstances that can cause bad days for infants are numerous; but, for example, some bad days can start with something like gas pains and be prolonged when the baby gets frazzled as a result of the earlier part of his bad day.

In any case, the message of this Hub is not that mothers should always be able to prevent every bad day, or that the baby who has the occasional episode (or short-term run of episodes) of falling off to sleep in a less-than-cheerful state-of-mind.

The message of this Hub is about which philosophy/practice each mother adopts when she considers whether she will be a mother who responds to her baby's cries as immediately as possible, or instead will be a mother who has decided that such an immediate response is not necessary and/or is not the right thing to do for her baby - hence, the phrase, "in general" in the sub-title.